d than the Angles. The Saxons
didn't come.

Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it is in the matter of the
book[82] of course, that collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is
superficially all mine in the sense that the last copy is all in my
hand. Lloyd did not even put pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the
Barbizon scene; it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest;
I had the best service from him on the character of Nares. You see, we
had been just meeting the man, and his memory was full of the man's
words and ways. And Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple. The
great difficulty of collaboration is that you can't explain what you
mean. I know what kind of effect I mean a character to give--what kind
of _tache_ he is to make; but how am I to tell my collaborator in words?
Hence it was necessary to say, "Make him So-and-so"; and this was all
right for Nares and Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but
for Bellairs, for instance--a man with whom I passed ten minutes fifteen
years ago--what was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, as a personal
artist, can begin a character with only a haze in my head, but how if I
have to translate the haze into words before I begin? In our manner of
collaboration (which I think the only possible--I mean that of one
person being responsible, and giving the _coup de pouce_ to every part
of the work) I was spared the obviously hopeless business of trying to
explain to my collaborator what _style_ I wished a passage to be treated
in. These are the times that illustrate to a man the inadequacy of
spoken language. Now--to be just to written language--I can (or could)
find a language for my every mood, but how could I _tell_ any one
beforehand what this effect was to be, which it would take every art
that I possessed, and hours and hours of deliberate labour and selection
and rejection, to produce? These are the impossibilities of
collaboration. Its immediate advantage is to focus two minds together on
the stuff, and to produce in consequence an extraordinarily greater
richness of purview, consideration, and invention. The hardest chapter
of all was "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers." You would not believe
what that cost us before it assumed the least unity and colour. Lloyd
wrote it at least thrice, and I at least five times--this is from
memory. And was that last chapter worth the trouble it cost? Alas, that
I should ask the question! Two classes of